(I find an excellent test for these people is asking them to explain the Altalena affair. Please post your responses to the thread above - not here. There really is such a thing as too much.)

I'm fascinated by the mind of the modern anti-Semite. While the story of the 20th century as a Jewish conspiracy is basically crazy, it is no crazier than many present-day beliefs that are considered normal and even fashionable. To be exact, the MacDonaldists attribute exactly the same pattern of behavior to Jews that folks like Jack O'Connell attribute to whites. The likes of Tanstaafl, NeoNietzsche, and Colin Laney certainly feel - quite genuinely, I'm sure - that they are having a "courageous conversation" about Jewish privilege.

The problem with the Jack McConnell theory of the world is that if there is anywhere in the US where white people feel it is socially acceptable to suggest that white people should cooperate on the basis of their shared whiteness, it is certainly not in the circles of power and privilege. Unless cell block D at San Quentin counts as such. And the same is true for Jews: while there are ethnocentric Jewish communities in the US, these are not exactly the people who run the New York Times. To say the least!

So to talk about modern, American white or Jewish ethnocentrism, without giving anyone the impression that you live on a different planet from the rest of us, you have to resort to the language of conspiracy theory. The motives of your enemies are either concealed, unconscious, or both. The more white people deny that they are racist, the more likely they are to be racist. And so on.

Not that I have read his entire oeuvre. But Kevin MacDonald strikes me as no more interested in actual Jews and what they actually think, than Jack O'Connell is in actual white people and what they actually think. Instead, both these factions invest a vast quantity of effort in constructing historical or anecdotal narratives which are not inconsistent with the premise of widespread white racism or Jewish ethnocentrism. They take it for granted that whites or Jews aren't just telling us what they actually think.

Whereas I know that black nationalism is quite common in the US, because you see it all over the place, even among the most influential African-Americans. Afrocentrism is quite fashionable. And not just among black people. If this were to change - if I were to see black Americans everywhere condemning Afrocentrism, denying they had ever even heard of Kwanzaa, giving their children names like "Ethan" and "Catherine" and "James," etc, etc, I would conclude that black nationalism was indeed on the wane.

Rather than having gone underground and morphed into a more sinister and devious form. Because secrets just don't scale. And as for the Jungian racial collective unconscious, it simply does not exist - enchanted as I am by the sheer breathtaking weirdness of race memory.

So I'm not at all surprised to find that the MacDonaldists are Noam Chomsky fans. It may seem incongruous, but there is a genuine shared perspective there. If only we could get them in the same room together.

The real tragedy is that anti-Semitism is not only a misinterpretation of history and reality, but (unlike black nationalism) a profoundly unfashionable one. Reviled, in fact, in all polite society.

If we cared what polite society thought, we would not be here at UR. I hold no brief at all for fashionable opinion. The problem with adopting unfashionable opinions, however, is that you really do need to be damn sure you're right.

When your opinions are both unfashionable and inaccurate - and when they hold no real promise of serving as a rallying point for a mob - they are unlikely to get you anywhere. Worse, adopting a worldview like anti-Semitism is such a drastic and terrible step, it is so socially and intellectually isolating, that stepping back out of it is almost impossible. If anything, it demands even more courage and conviction than getting in in the first place.

Anyway, I promised other links.

Frequent UR commenter George Weinberg, whose style of thinking is remarkably similar to mine, has a new blog. Please visit it and comment.

The great Carter van Carter, proprietor of Across Difficult Country, which may well be the funniest site on the Internet, has a new political blog, Craptocracy. Carter makes me look polite and respectful.

And if you are not amused by this post by Macro Man, or by his devastatingly hilarious Arthur Conan Doyle takeoff (part 1, part 2), or by Cassandra's inflationary almanack, you have either no sense of humor, or no interest in finance. And if the latter, bear in mind that - to paraphrase Trotsky - finance may still be interested in you.

21 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Kevin MacDonaldism is not identical with anti-semitism, it is a subset of anti-semitism. I don't put any stock in MacDonald, but at the same time, it's undeniable that Jews are overrepresented in the nation-destroying, open-borders left, even if the blame for inventing it falls upon WASP busybodies.

It's possible to be on this side of Kevin MacDonald and on that side of Abe Foxman, at the same time, but Abe will still call you an anti-Semite, so demolishing MacDonald doesn't answer the Jewish question.

It's also not true that you need crazy talk to "accuse" whites and Jews of ethnocentrism (as if there's something wrong with that). Almost all whites will tell you they're not racist if you ask them, but they still mostly marry other whites, do their best to live among whites, send their kids to white schools, etc. Leftists regularly beat us over the head with studies showing that blacks are discriminated against by cops/loan officers/real estate agents. Jews do the same things, and nobody gives them any shit about things like http://www.jdate.com/. Granted, this is a long way from Hitler or Meir Kahane, but it's still ethnocentricity and it's real. Or, to put it another way, no, whites and Jews aren't telling us what they really think. Jack O'Connell (not McConnell) is nuts because he's blaming black failure on the "white privilege" that somehow failed to prevent Asians and Jews from outstripping mainstream whites, not because he believes that white ethnocentricity exists in a the sickly, attenuated, half-buried form that multicultists call "white privilege."

I would suggest that Jacques Barzun's concept of shared concerns rather than shared solutions is applicable here. Jewish intellectuals tend to have shared concerns, from which they often wind up at diametrically opposed proposed solutions.

For example, Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine points out in his invaluable book "The Jewish Century" that so many Eastern European Jews became Bolsheviks because they had three main concerns for which they saw communism as the solution:

- They were discriminated against on account of nationality, so they favored Bolshevism because it promised to get rid of nations.

- They were discriminated against on account of religion, so Bolshevism would abolish religions.

- They were discriminated against by the working class and peasants because they were so good at capitalism, so Bolshevism would eliminate capitalism.

In contrast, say, libertarian Jews tend to reason (more straightforwardly) that if Jews are good at capitalism, then capitalism is good for the Jews.

Other Jews reasoned that if not having a nation-state was bad for the Jews, then starting their own nation would be good for the Jews.

And so forth ...

Same concerns (e.g., Is it good for the Jews?), but different solutions.

The point is that you can't understand the history of the last 100 years without thinking intensely about Jewish concerns.

"...you can't understand the history of the last 100 years without thinking intensely about Jewish concerns."

True, which makes me question the value of understanding history. I mean, from the perspective of an ex-Iowa farmboy, what the hell does any of it have to do with me? If nothing else, reading this blog has made me realize just how easily people can be swayed by propaganda. They want so badly to be a part of something bigger than themselves that they'll sign on to just damn near anything... Nationalism, Progressivism, Catholicism, Militarism, whatever the hell is at hand.

The Jews are fascinating - even (and perhaps especially) to their enemies - because they are the only people to have survived as an identifiable group with a continuous history and tradition going back to the times of classical antiquity.

Where now are the ancient Egyptians, or Greeks, or Romans? Où sont les neiges d'antan? The people who live in Egypt, or Greece, or central Italy may be, and probably are, descended from the people who lived there two and three millennia ago, but they cannot trace their ancestry definitively; they do not worship the gods nor do they follow the other customs of the former inhabitants of those places.

There is a peculiar stubbornness to a people who have survived forcible dispersion and subsequent recurring persecutions for two thousand years while retaining an identity which throughout that period would have been more comfortable to abandon. There have, of course, been those that did abandon it and disappeared with varying degrees of success into the surrounding population, whatever it was - this has served only to leave as the remaining group those who were strongest in the will to persist in their separateness.

The phenomenon of ghettoization, it seems to me, is often misunderstood as being imposed on Jews from the outside, when as a matter of fact it was in part the result of conscious choice on their part. Mediæval and early modern Christianity and past or present Islam do not harbor a racialist antipathy to Jews, but theological antipathy to Judaism. From their point of view any Jew who accepts Christianity or Judaism as a system of belief ceases from that point to be a Jew and is a Christian or a Muslim. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, this was the only form of "anti-Semitism" that existed. References to Jews as a "race" before this time have to be placed in the context of the way the word "race" was ordinarily used, which was more as the term nationality or ethnicity might now be used.

Racialist anti-Semitism is a creation of nineteenth-century speculative anthropology and is based on a questionable interpretation of philology or linguistics; the word Aryan, with which we are so familiar from Nazi propaganda, was drawn from this field where it was used to denote a family of languages known as Indo-Aryan.

Whatever the pretext or rationalization of antipathy to Jews may be, the antipathy itself is at its base the objection to their continuing separateness. I suspect this will never go away, as long as people retain their deeply rooted habit of finding others to blame for the shortcomings they experience in their own lives. The misfortune of the Jews therefore has the same origins as their strength, namely in their (self)identification as a group apart from the rest of the world.

Careless in proofreading before posting, I should have corrected the third sentence in my fourth paragraph above to read: "From their point of view any Jew who accepts Christianity or Islam ceases from that point to be a Jew and is a Christian or a Muslim." - MS

Modern American Jews are a little embarrassed at the idea of JDate, just as modern American whites are a little embarrassed when they talk about "good schools."

But I wouldn't call this a case of ethnocentrism. I'd call it a case of reality. Universalist Jews sign up for JDate despite their political and theological opinions, not because of them. There's also a dating service around here that limits its customers to Ivy League graduates, and I'm sure the embarrassment is similar.

So JDate is in a way the exception that proves the rule. I simply can't imagine the average JDate customer going in for some kind of Jew Power thing. Quite the opposite - the beliefs of Universalist Jews tend to be quite dangerous, in my opinion, to their ethnic genetic interests.

I still need to read Slezkine, but there's no question that Jews played a tremendously important part in 20th-century history. As Steve says, it is very easy to see how was so appealing to so many Jews, and it is hard to imagine it being as successful as it was without their talents.

But if you were a Jew and became a Bolshevik, you really did put aside your Jewish identity. In the various Communist purges, cliques of Jewish apparatchiks were often accused of Semitic conspiracy. But I don't think the evidence for this is all that great.

I really do admire the SYs and other communities that have succeeded in hanging on to their traditional identities. I admire them for the same reason I admire, say, the Amish. If the word was not so polluted, I'd have no problem calling myself a "multiculturalist."

But in 2007, most Americans of Jewish descent are about as culturally Jewish as Americans of Irish descent, say, are Irish. The thread may be three thousand years old, but it's definitely been cut.

Both Jews and Armenians are discussed in "Are Jews Generic?" which I hosted here, and highly recommend. Another quote goes "It takes two Arabs to outsmart a Greek, two Greeks to outsmart a Jew and two Jews to outsmart an Armenian". I think the genocide of Arabs documented in "Africa Addio" can also be better understood in light of that piece.

Earlier, Mencius, I had ignored your discussion of "The Iron Wall" and Jabotinsky. However, when I found people were still harping on it here, I decided to check it out. Wonderfully clear thinking in that.

Michael S, thanks for the most insightful comment on this topic I've seen in awhile.

mm: But in 2007, most Americans of Jewish descent are about as culturally Jewish as Americans of Irish descent, say, are Irish. The thread may be three thousand years old, but it's definitely been cut.

I think this is only about half-right (meaning it is half-wrong). Modern secular Jews may have drifted far from the gravitational well of HaShem but they have not escaped his orbit by any means (to challenge your rather all-or-nothing metaphor with a more suitable one). Having kids tends to pull the reprobrates back into the fold. Intermarriage is of course a problem, but the rates seem to be lower than was previously believed. What are those folks doing at JDate if they are so perfectly assimillated? Obviously, the thread is not completely cut, and is stronger than it appears. I speak as someone who used to consider himself the most atheistic and secular of Jews, and have found myself pulled back in despite myself.

The pull of Jewishness is quite a bit stronger than the pull of Irishness. This may be related, in whatever causal direction you prefer, to the fact that there is still a small but robust segment of society that blames Jews for their troubles and would like to finish off the job of slaughtering them. As it happens, one's ethnic identity is not entirely a matter of personal choice, others seem to want to have a say in it, as entirely assimilated German Jews found out in the 1930s.

Common-sense would seem to dictate that there should be lot more "ant-semitism"(of the variety espoused by Jimmy Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt, Norman Finkelstein, etc.) in the US given the verypeculiarrelationship between the two countries.

Israel is , after all ,a country that committed acts of war against the US on at least two occasions-the Lavon Affair and the attack on the USS Liberty- and was never made to suffer for it. On the contrary it became,and still is, the US's biggest foreign aid recipient.

The likes of Tanstaafl, NeoNietzsche, and Colin Laney certainly feel - quite genuinely, I'm sure - that they are having a "courageous conversation" about Jewish privilege.

Here's a courageous question for you. How much of White privilege is actually Jewish privilege? Here are more. If Jews consider themselves White, why are they not outraged by the poisonous teachings of so-called Whiteness Studies? Why are they so hostile to White nationalism? Why do they favor non-White immigration? Why are their positions on these particular issues so monolithic?

I would say the answer to the first question is: alot. And by Occam, who Mencius favors so much, the answer to the others is: because they don't consider themselves White. They sometimes say they do, but they just as often say they see themselves as a Tribe, the Choosen People, a "minority".

So to talk about modern, American white or Jewish ethnocentrism, without giving anyone the impression that you live on a different planet from the rest of us, you have to resort to the language of conspiracy theory. The motives of your enemies are either concealed, unconscious, or both.

My language is as plain as I can make it. My enemies include anyone who favors open borders. From what I can see the two ethnic groups most prominent in their support for open borders, Latinos and Jews, are not only conscious of their ethnocentrism, they openly celebrate it.

On Mencius' planet political correctness is a conspiracy theory that can be brushed aside with a sentence. On my plant most people live under the regime of political correctness, where opposition to open borders is considered crimethink. The most mild label for it is xenophobia, as if it is literally a psychological problem. Another label that is often used, especially if you directly criticize Latinos, is racism. This condition is attributed to ignorance, with some moral decrepitude thrown in. Heaven forbid you note the Jewish support for immigration and criticize that. In this case you are labeled an anti-semite. Once again your mental and moral health are questioned, on top of which you will very likely be called evil. Note the common thread throughout. A person is by definition insane and immoral to question the unwritten and ever-changing dogma of PC. They are defective. It is right and proper to demonize them. To defend PC, on the other hand, makes you a good and noble member of polite society. The most superior members of all volunteer for the Jew Force, and waste their time arguing against Nazis so other polite people don't have to.

I violate PC on my blog. I don't do it lightly. I do it in order to talk honestly about what I think about. Lately what I think about is how this dreadful PC regime came to be. Why is it so inconsistent and hypocritical? Why are Whites bad if they favor their group but Latinos and Jews are not? If Jews are White then why under PC are they protected from criticism, while Whites are not? The truth is you can't think about immigration without eventually thinking about Latinos, Jews, and political correctness. If you prefer not to be called a racist or anti-semite you don't say anything. Eventually you'll stop thinking about immigration. I think that's precisely the intended effect of PC.

The Jews are fascinating - even (and perhaps especially) to their enemies - because they are the only people to have survived as an identifiable group with a continuous history and tradition going back to the times of classical antiquity. (Michael S.)

The Chinese and the Indians still practise the same religions and speak the same languages as they did millenia ago. But of course there are only a couple of billion of them, so they're easy to miss.

Mediæval and early modern Christianity and past or present Islam do not harbor a racialist antipathy to Jews, but theological antipathy to Judaism. (Michael S.)

This may be related, in whatever causal direction you prefer, to the fact that there is still a small but robust segment of society that blames Jews for their troubles and would like to finish off the job of slaughtering them. (mtraven)

In America, no segment of the society has ever advocated the extermination of the Jews. Today's anti-Semites are well-known for their view that "the job" cannot be "finished off" as it was never started.

You seem to have swallowed hook, line and sinker the ADL fundraising propaganda according to which we are as if eternally stuck in Germany anno 1935 or so, with a Holocaust just around the corner.

th said: In America, no segment of the society has ever advocated the extermination of the Jews....You seem to have swallowed hook, line and sinker the ADL fundraising propaganda..

th, the point was whether Jews have more ethnic solidarity than the Irish, and if so why. Whether or not there are antisemitic exterminationists in the US (and there are certainly some, including some just a hyperlink away, but probably not very many), the memory of encountering them in Europe is reasonably fresh and the Middle East is producing a more of them today. The ADL uses scare tactics, but the point is that they work, because credible threats are not that far away in time or geography. What are the Irish going to do, whip up fear that the Know Nothing Party is coming back? (in its original form that is. The anti-Mexican contemporary version seems to have legs.) German Jews up until the 1930s thought they were pretty well assimilated, and they were, more so in fact than Jews in the US are today. Which is not to say that Jews in the US are in danger of massacre, only that they might still feel a little bit uneasy and still feel a little need for some ethnic solidarity -- which is what the argument was about.

Th: of course, the Chinese and Indians have ancient civilizations, but these were not part of 'classical antiquity,' i.e., of the ancient societies around the Mediterranean basin in which what we call Western Civilization was formed. It is my impression that knowledge of these ancient oriental civilizations did not come to the attention of western scholars until the late eighteenth century, through the researches of the Asiatick Society of Bengal, founded by Sir William Jones (1746-94). Marco Polo's tales of China were regarded as fantasies by his contemporaries - hence the nickname 'Il Milione" (the million, i.e., lies). Knowledge about China did not begin to flow to the West until the Jesuit missions of the 16th and 17th centuries, and even then it was not widely diffused or appreciated.

On the other hand, western awareness of the continuity of Jewish religous and cultural practice goes back to the middle ages, and the role of the Jews in classical antiquity is well documented - see the works of Flavius Josephus and Philo Judæus.

It is interesting to note that within a relatively short time after western scholarship became aware of the antiquity of Indian culture and of the kinship between Sanskrit and the European languages, the sort of racialist anti-Semitism I described in my earlier post emerged. It was based on anthropological assumptions about the migrations of 'Aryan' peoples from some uncertain northern location into India and their subjugation of the darker-skinned Dravidian peoples who had previously inhabited the subcontinent - an event that is still reflected in the caste divisions of modern India. Since the Mycenæan Greeks had similarly come from the north into the Peloponessus, briniging with them their 'Indo-Aryan' language, and displacing or conquering the aboriginal population; since the Romans legendarily traced their ancestry to another migrant people from the north-east (the Trojans - see the Aeneid); the speculative anthropology thus derived from a mixture of comparative philology and ancient myth was all too readily set to the purpose of displacing the Jews from the position they had traditionally held in scholarship about the origins of Western civilization. See Joscelyn Godwin's book "Arktos" for more details.

As for the Iberian persecution of Jews, it has elements that might seem superficially to resemble those of more recent racialist anti-Semitism, but in fact it originated in the belief that the conversions of Jews to Christianity were not genuine and that the conversos were practicing Judaism secretly. Thus, for example, the Inquisition regarded with suspicion such behavior as cleaning one's house on a Friday, since this suggested that the Jewish sabbath would be kept there beginning at sunset. This bespeaks religious rather than racialist concerns. That does not, of course, mitigate the character of the persecution - it just defines it.

As is www.someonejewish.com , jmeet.com, totallyjewishdating.com.As is the ADL, and AIPAC, and Commentary, and JINSA, and Jewcy.com, and "project Birthright" and Hebe magazine and Alan Dershowitz, and Elliot Abrams, and David and Merav Wurmser, and Jonah "Israel has more right to its land than the United States has to the Southwest" Goldberg. All exceptions, each and every one.

Tanstaafl, I wanted to reply on your blog but couldn't for some reason. I think MM is about the best you'll get out of a Jew. He'll come so far but no farther; at heart, he remains an obfuscator. Still, obfuscation is better than aggression or denial, these being the only alternatives to open admission -- which is out of the queston . It's hard to blame them, since they don't see much (or an easy) future in racially-awakened white America for themselves. Real rock and hard place stuff.

Btw, MM, check out Walter Sanning's "Dissolution of Eastern European Jewery" for a lowdown on the pre and post-war demographic scene. I think you'll see no "act of God"-reinterpretation of a European history sans Holocaust is required.

I'm not done going through the comments here but I just caved in and created the following file in my bookmarks (its name is at last five times as long as that of any other bookmark folder):

"jewish peculiarism - CONFINED almost entirely to the fact of Jewish influence/monetary-success and whether that can be attributed (at least in part, for they generally don't deny jewish cerebral advantage) to various antisemitic ideas regarding jews' psyches"

Should I have the good fortune to come across (even) more threads populated by the intellectual giants of our era who can (seemingly) discuss this subject for months on end without food or bathroom breaks I'll be sure to add those to my brand spankin new file. Anyhow, on account of what obviously must come across - quite accurately - as annoyance I should probably explain that the length of this file name, as well as my annoyance, is on account of the fact that I believe that these "brave" discussors of this taboo subject most generally miss the wide breadth of the discussion and confine themselves, rather parochially, to their own low interests - close examination of the naked Jew, engaged in primarily for the voyeuristic interest in watching their subject squirm.

Or, in English, I'm a big fan of the subject but I believe that the majority (and most avid) of my fellow fans A. miss out on the lion's share of the spectrum of more likely (and stronger) possibilities and B. have puerile, rather than scientific, curiosities about the subject.

For my own part, I've engaged these brave few on many an occasion and I provide two representative samples here, the first being my responses to articulate table-thumpers over on Sailer's comment threads and the second being a modest contribution of mine (originating as a comment over at MondoWeiss) toward a more accurate (and therefore, for the love of God, limited!) assessment of Jewish peculiarity leading to murderous antisemitism: Jews, Jews, Jews and Mini-Note On a Possible and Occasional Contributor to Antisemitism